DIPLOMACY ДИПЛОМАЦИЯ

A SHIFTING ASIAN NUCLEAR

A SHIFTING ASIAN NUCLEAR ORDER in mind some ceiling for weapons production that accords with its nuclear doctrine. But what is North Korea’s nuclear doctrine? If it intended to be able to attack a particular number of targets, that would be one thing. But if its real motive is to seed fear and concern among those it sees as its potential adversaries, the number might well be more open-ended. Wit and Ahn argue that, given the conventional force imbalance on the Korean Peninsula, Pyongyang ought to be interested in more than a doctrine of assured retaliation; that is, it should be interested in nuclear weapons that offer real war-fighting options, just as Pakistan is. But constructing that sort of arsenal and integrating it with the North’s existing conventional forces would be a challenge. Optimists might find a small glimmer of hope in the declaration made by Kim Jongun at this year’s party congress, that ‘North Korea will not use nuclear weapons against other nations unless its sovereignty is threatened, and will work toward non-proliferation and global stability.’ (41) That’s not exactly a no-first-use pledge, although some read it as such. Still, it might be about the limit of what North Korea can realistically undertake. Yes, the North Koreans might easily judge their sovereignty to be threatened by mere conventionalweapon attacks. But they would lose an important part of the deterrent aspects of their nuclear arsenal – and sound incredible to boot – if they were to give a full no-first-use pledge. The problem, though, lies in knowing where the latest statement fits in regard to previous ones. In some ways, North Korea’s nuclear doctrine seems to be the reverse of Pakistan’s: Pakistan’s is driven by military logic; North Korea’s primarily by political pique. The latest example of that was the string of bellicose threats of potential nuclear use that emanated from Pyongyang during recent US – South Korean military exercises. See Kim Jong-un’s injunction in early March 2016 that North Korea’s nuclear weapons be maintained at a high state of readiness, able to be used at any time. (42) Still, we know so little about North Korea’s command and control arrangements that it’s hard to tell whether those statements alter anything and, if so, by how much. And, of course, precisely the same is true of the latest commitment made at the party congress. The unremitting growth in North Korean capabilities also raises questions about what, if anything, can be done to slow that growth and ultimately reverse it. One awful possibility is that only regime change in Pyongyang could achieve such a turnaround – and such a change remains unforeseeable and potentially some decades distant. It will probably be impossible to gain much leverage against the North Korean nuclear program without China playing an important role. So far, an increasingly frustrated Beijing’s been unwilling to apply sufficient pressure to Pyongyang to make it reconsider its nuclear choices. It worries that such pressure might contribute to regime instability in North Korea, and it calculates that such instability is a greater threat to its own interests than a North Korea equipped with a small nuclear arsenal. So far, there’s little sign of that calculus changing. Even if it did change, Beijing would still find it difficult to force Pyongyang’s hand on the nuclear issue. The North Koreans have made it clear that they have no intention of rolling back their program. Compounding the difficulty of making any assessment about the future of the North Korean nuclear program is the difficulty of making any assessment about the future of North Korea itself. How likely is North Korea’s continued survival as a separate entity? In South Korea, the Presidential Committee for Unification Preparation wrestles with the challenges that reunification would bring, conscious that unification should ideally proceed through voluntary, deliberate and peaceful means, but alert to the prospect that it might yet arise unexpectedly from crisis and conflict. In the meantime, we face a growing conundrum: how DIPLOMACY 18/2016 167

A SHIFTING ASIAN NUCLEAR ORDER do we deal with a North Korea that’s simultaneously an impoverished state and an existential threat? We still don’t have a solution to one of the most vexing issues in the Asian nuclear order, and the danger is growing. Pyongyang shuns options of unilateral restraint. And even its attachment to a managed system of deterrence is uncertain. Kim Jong-un is trying to offset strategic weakness by excessive bombast, and that’s a worrying combination. Extended nuclear assurance and its utility in Asia The US strategic policy that’s normally understood as ‘extended nuclear deterrence’ is, in fact, a blend of four separate elements. (43) Those elements lie at the heart of the US’s relationships with its principal allies and potential adversaries. Let’s begin by clarifying the separate elements. Extended nuclear deterrence’ is a fully-fledged deterrence policy: it’s meant to deter potential adversaries from attacks on US allies or their vital interests. In this sense, the US nuclear arsenal, both strategic and non-strategic, is intended to compensate for an ally’s lack of such an arsenal by ‘extending’ the deterrence benefits of US nuclear assets to the protection of allies. Deterring adversaries from attacking US allies is a key pillar of the existing global order. The second element is ‘extended nuclear assurance’: by its provision of a nuclear umbrella to an ally, the US ‘assures’ that ally that its nuclear strategic needs can be met without the ally’s development of an indigenous nuclear arsenal. Assurance of allies is – for the reasons explained in the Healey theorem (44) – a much more demanding challenge than deterrence of adversaries. Allies are more sensitive than adversaries to signals that US commitment might be less than wholehearted. Alongside those two important elements of the policy sit two others, which are probably best seen as stabilising elements. Alongside extended nuclear deterrence sits an element that some – including Linton Brooks and Mira Rapp-Hooper – have called ‘reassurance’. The US deters its adversaries but must, to a degree, simultaneously reassure them that its policies turn upon a rational basis of conflict management, escalation control and war termination. That element of reassurance of adversaries shares with the element of assurance of allies a set of signals that the US appreciates the vital interests of others, but the context of the reassurance task varies enormously from that of the assurance one. Finally, alongside the US’s extended nuclear assurance relationship with its allies sits an element we might call ‘tethering’. The US has no interest in having its nuclear commitment determined solely by an ally’s willingness to identify a particular interest as vital. So it uses its provision of an extended nuclear assurance as a tether upon an ally’s excesses – something it would be less well placed to do if that ally possessed its own nuclear arsenal. One element of tethering merits special mention. The strength of US commitment to an ally’s defence allows it to threaten to withdraw that commitment if the ally crosses some particular behavioural threshold set by Washington – by developing its own nuclear arsenal, for example. All alliances have about them an element of tethering that’s felt even at the conventional-force level. It’s no real surprise that tethers also inhabit nuclear relationships. So, what’s happening in Asia? See Brad Roberts’ observation from 2013: ‘In Northeast Asia, extended deterrence and strategic stability have regained an importance not known since the darkest days of the Cold War. This is a natural result of developments in the security environment.’ (45) This is an area where Australia has a direct stake. Australians in 2016 don’t automatically 168 ДИПЛОМАЦИЯ 18/2016